Time-Sensitive Material
Henry J. Petroski · American Scientist · 2000
e mark time differently than we mea sure distance. Although none of us is likely ever to have seen a car odometer read 000000, we infer that that was in deed the reading when it was installed at the facto ry. As the car was driven from the assembly line to its parking lot, the wheels began to turn and the machine registered tenths, miles, tens of miles and so forth as they were reached. With dates we mark the days, months and years before they are com pleted, however, and so from the instant after mid night on New Year's Eve 1999, we by custom write the date as 01 /01 /00, even though it will be anoth er 24 hours before that day is completed. And it will not be until midnight on 12/31/00 that the year 2000 is completed, and with it the 20th century. Y2K notwithstanding, the second millennium will really end not with a bang but a whimper. Engineers and scientists know all this, of course, but it would have been difficult for us to persuade the mass media to hold out for an en tire year before recognizing the arrival of the 21st century and the new millennium, which truly begins on 01/01/01. If we were to insist on wait ing until 2000 turned into 2001 for our celebra tions, we would risk being seen as spoilsports at best or hopelessly out of date at worst. Ironically, it has been the focus on the very technical prob lem of Y2K computer compliance, a problem closely associated with engineers and scientists, or at least computer scientists, that has empha sized the four-digit year, which in turn has dri ven the focus of the date change to the odometer like event of 1999 turning into 2000. The year change is being treated as a counting event, when in fact all it is, is a marking event. Not since the upside-down year 1961 almost four decades ago or the palandromic and mirror image year 1881 over a century ago has a year's number been treated as such an icon. Such oddities will not occur again until the numero logically rich seventh millennium gives us the year 6119, and the ninth millennium gives us 8118. In terms of numerical patterns, 1999 and 2000 are identical?a single digit followed by an